History of the glass museum

In 1991, the City decided to purchase several works in glass paste from the artists Etienne and Antoine Leperlier, whose grandfather François Décorchemont had been a famous master glassmaker of the 20th century, and in this way to support their project of installation of workshops in the commune. Two years later, the town also decided to acquire from the Sainte-Foy private school the stained glass window Christ Teaching Children, made in 1934 by François Décorchemont and offered by him to the school for its catechism class . That same year, an exhibition of contemporary works in glass paste by the Leperlier brothers took place in the Maison des arts in Conches.

Attentive to the wishes of certain residents of the town who wanted a museum to be opened in Conches, the Town decided in 1996 to create a first museum, called the Museum of Glass, Stone and Book, to bring together the old collections. municipal (Archaeology, ethnology, fine arts, old books, etc.) and new glassware collections. From 2001, the museum began to organize temporary exhibitions of glass art. Initially, these focused solely on contemporary glass creations by French artists or artists residing in France who use different glass techniques (blowing, molding, thermoforming, cutting, engraving, etc.) to create unique works in the field of sculpture. Among the artists exhibited are the best-known figures in this field such as Yan Zoritchak, Mateï Négreanu, Bernard Dejonghe, Raymond Martinez, Valdimir Zbynovsky...

However, the initial presence within the museum's collections of works created by the glassmaker from Conches, François Décorchemont, master of glass paste, encouraged the museum to broaden the scientific field of the museum to the different areas of stained glass and decorative arts. glass from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 21st century. Thus, from 2010, the museum organized exhibitions of contemporary stained glass (Henri Guérin, The workshop collection in 2010), stained glass windows from the Second Reconstruction (Gabriel Loire, the workshop collection stained glass slab in 2014 ) and stained glass from the interwar period (Hébert-Stevens, Rinuy, Bony, the Parisian workshop of glass painters in 2017), as well as exhibitions of glasswork produced by French or foreign glass manufacturers such as Schneider in 2012, Legras in 2013 and Loetz in 2018.

During this same period, the acquisition budgets allocated by the municipality and by the Regional Acquisition Fund for Museums of Upper Normandy (FRAM), as well as the generosity of several donors, considerably favored the development of the collections created. in 2018, around 500 works.

From 2018, the project for a new glass museum is being implemented.

This opens on June 25, 2022 and on this occasion, it is renamed the François Décorchemont Glass Museum.